Thursday, June 11, 2015

It would be amusing if they start thieving government identities now that they have all the data they need to produce them:

Hackers stole personnel data and Social Security numbers for every federal employee, a government worker union said Thursday, saying that the cyber theft of U.S. employee information was more damaging than the Obama administration has acknowledged.

Perhaps the federal government should have abided by the wisdom of the Founders, and respected the Fourth Amendment.

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

No citizen should ever be required to give any information to the government, barring a Warrant. They might as reasonably be required to post it on the front door of their house for anyone passing by.

Uh, it's the SSNs of federal employees. Of course your employer has your SSN. No fourth amendment issues here at all. And as previously revealed, it's everyone's security clearance paperwork, which you have to submit for most interesting federal jobs. They government isn't going to put you in a sensitive position without knowing if you have blackmail vulnerabilities or a past history of irresponsible behavior.

Perhaps the federal government should have abided by the wisdom of the Founders, and respected the Fourth Amendment.

The Chinks would be coming for our info anyway.

No citizen should ever be required to give any information to the government, barring a Warrant.

The Chinks stole the personnel data and Social Security numbers of US government employees. You can hardly argue that US government employees should not be required to give their personnel data and Social Security numbers to their employer (the USG). Your employer does not need a "warrant" to get the info. You give it to them or you don't get the job.

Wikileaks please post the addresses of all govt employees that earn over $90,000. Bath House Barry wants to used the Pool Hoax to push more die verse city into affluent neighborhoods. Just your name and SSN is all someone needs to open some fake accounts like store credit cards and services. http://thehill.com/regulation/244620-obamas-bid-to-diversify-wealthy-neighborhoods

Also found a new worse of the worse website."I found a video with James Edwards in the backgroundhttp://ovenworthy.com/watch-this-young-boys-weird-trick-for-fighting-homophobia/ and I am half tempted to have this put on a shirt to wear out for pride but it would be a zazzle rush orderhttp://ovenworthy.com/you-consider-yourself-a-male-ally-read-up-and-be-a-cuck/"

Some years back I started noticing how the old, largely unspoken, barrier against use of SSNs as a national ID number was starting to break down. Now, upon return after a long time overseas, it's amazing to me. Every piece of business over the phone seems to involve some foreigner droning "Can I preez hab yr soshul seccurty nuumba fer verifica..verific...veri-cashun purposes?"

In my job, I get to speak to a lot of people with on-the-ground experience with China. You're not going to find anyone who holds USG in more contempt than me, but let me tell you (and these are not right-wing people, not even close) if half of what they are telling me is accurate, we have very little to worry about from China.

It's also instructive to realize this: as poor of an ally the U.S. is, and it is very unreliable in a pinch as Mubarak, Marcos, the Shah and countless others could testify, China is so god-awful that in the past year alone the Philippines, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, India and even *Vietnam* have signed new defense agreements at their insistence, not ours. It's quite interesting.

The fact that they have anti-ship cruise missiles and conventional ICBM's that give them the ability to hit American vessels operating several hundred kilometers from their shore, all of these missiles located well inside their border and which would likely lead to a nuclear war if American forces tried landing people to disable tends to disagree with you. Oh sure, the Chinese only have one not particularly well kept aircraft carrier that's more a propaganda victory than anything else, but aside from those missiles they have, they also have numerous smaller, but still potentially deadly to even super carriers, missile boats even smaller than their ability to land probes on the moon reliably and have them work for longer than the lifespan of a Dragonfly.

In short, getting close to the Chinese mainland for defensive operations of say, Taiwan, the Northern Philippines, or the Senkaku Islands, especially Taiwan, is going to be extremely hazardous for our vessels operating there, which they likely must do in order to fulfill our defense agreements with our allies and ally like folks in the region.

Through in the fact that although the PLA Navy sucks ass through a straw compared to our navy, they only have to travel a few hundred kilometers at most in order to, say, land ground troops on Taiwan or the Senkaku islands, and, well, you're probably going to wish our vessels had point-defense systems capable of taking down a missile saturation attack with even sixty percent accuracy.

The problem with the Chinese is that so many of the poor are expendable. They wouldn't care if we nuked a couple hundred million people as long as the right people are in bunkers. The actual per capita earnings of china are even lower than Mexico.

Hey Nate I think they are adding this to common core gym classes. http://ovenworthy.com/watch-this-young-boys-weird-trick-for-fighting-homophobia/

Well, this wasn't exactly about the 4th Amendment, unless you consider it karma or divine justice for real government violations of the 4th. It was hackers, possibly Chinese or Chinese government, who broke in and stole information that is typical information provided to employers (e.g., name, birth date, address, phone, ...). I imagine that info has been provided, as a condition of employment, for hundreds if not thousands of years.

See http://20committee.com/2015/06/11/the-opm-hacking-scandal-just-got-worse/

"Whoever now holds OPM’s records possesses something like the Holy Grail from a CI perspective. They can target Americans in their database for recruitment or influence. After all, they know their vices, every last one — the gambling habit, the inability to pay bills on time, the spats with former spouses, the taste for something sexual on the side (perhaps with someone of a different gender than your normal partner) — since all that is recorded in security clearance paperwork (to get an idea of how detailed this gets, you can see the form, called an SF86, here)."

The problem with China is that we have no strategy for dealing with them. Which is hardly a surprise, since we don't have a strategy for dealing with anyone.

China on the other hand appears to have worked out a multifaceted, multi-layered in-depth long range strategy for dealing with us. Although most of that appears to be along the lines of gain incremental advantages wherever possible and wait for the inevitable collapse of the US federal reserve.

Finished Ann Coulter's Adios America. That book will make you want to go on a holy war against illegal immigrants and the traitorous elites that brought them here. There's so much realtalk in it that it could've been written by an Ilk member. If every American read even just the middle third of it, there'd be bodies swinging from lampposts the next morning.

I recommend it for those on the fence (heh) about immigration or if you know somebody that it is. It'll turn them militant.

"It's also instructive to realize this: as poor of an ally the U.S. is, and it is very unreliable in a pinch as Mubarak, Marcos, the Shah and countless others could testify, China is so god-awful that in the past year alone the Philippines, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, India and even *Vietnam* have signed new defense agreements at their insistence, not ours. It's quite interesting."

Amazing how awful these people say America is, yet the moment somebody snarls they come begging for us to help. If they think the world's going to be a better place without America in the lead, I almost wish they could experience it for themselves again.

because they, the .gov, are using the SSN as a universal personal id. just like they promised they would never do.

this is wholly a problem of the FedGov's creation.

there's even more funny to be had. FedGov internet security is so piss poor ... that this was discovered by a vendor during sales demonstration to the Office of Personnel Management ...http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/06/report-hack-of-government-employee-records-discovered-by-product-demo/

had CyTech NOT been running that network analysis demo, live, OPM would STILL not know about this breach.

also, i like the union's complaint:" and that federal employees "deserve more than a difficult-to-navigate website and call center contractors who do not know the answers to questions that go beyond a FAQ template."

no bitch, you deserve a shitty, useless website just like we get to use for ObamaCare. you certainly don't deserve any better service than we get down at the DMV.

i do wonder why this kind of info is even accessible from the internet.

the .gov shits so much money away as it is, why aren't they doing this type of thing on a closed intranet?

China on the other hand appears to have worked out a multifaceted, multi-layered in-depth long range strategy for dealing with us. Although most of that appears to be along the lines of gain incremental advantages wherever possible and wait for the inevitable collapse of the US federal reserve.

Ironically, the collapse of the Fed is probably the quickest way for the US to regain most of the ground we've lost over the last 50 years.

"China on the other hand appears to have worked out a multifaceted, multi-layered in-depth long range strategy for dealing with us. Although most of that appears to be along the lines of gain incremental advantages wherever possible and wait for the inevitable collapse of the US federal reserve."

Recently in an Intelligence course I've been taking we've been focusing on China and their cyber attacks against the US, and it's interesting the amount of information regarding their motives that's available on the web. The Chinese really, really do not want a war right now, even less than the United States does. While the Chinese people think they can beat us in a fight, for some absurd reason, the government doesn't want to provoke the U.S. because they don't believe they're ready yet. They see us as a threat to their rising power and influence, but they reserve most of their hatred for Taiwan and Japan, for whom the agitprop has been ratcheted up to 11 in the past few decades.

China would not launch a strike first, not while the United States remains their dominant economic partner. They have nothing to gain from a war with us now, outside of establishing themselves a runner for global power, and seeing as they have no ability to project that power (yet) they could not maintain it. Unless China has some super-secret weapons and blue-water aircraft carriers that they're carefully hiding and the U.S. goes belly-up in the near-future, they're not a threat.

because they, the .gov, are using the SSN as a universal personal id. just like they promised they would never do.

Thank you bob. Employers aren't asking for SSNs just because they feel like it. The feds demand they do it.

Which of course is why half of our kids have probably had their SSNs stolen by illegals and will someday be hit with back taxes,fines and penalties. Because the illegals ain't gonna pay...

(seriously, just had someone in our small town have this happen to their teenager this year after he got his first "real" job and filed his first tax return. The IRS had him down for several grand of unpaid taxes working two thousand miles away over the last few years The family is shelling out several hundred dollars to an attorney trying to deal with it.).

I assume sometime in the next ten years, the SSN system will collapse due to too many security breeches and not enough money to pay the benefits. There will be terabytes of data indexed by SSNs that nobody can be sure actually represent the same person. At the same time, the feds will need to start choosing between making SocSec benefits payments and making Payroll.

"Unless China has some super-secret weapons and blue-water aircraft carriers that they're carefully hiding and the U.S. goes belly-up in the near-future, they're not a threat..."

...says the mealy mouthed dip shit who thinks aircraft carriers are all it takes to win modern naval engagements, especially when the enemy has long range missiles that can hit you in Taiwanese, Filipino, and Japanese waters from well inside their border and missile boats designed for saturation fire and to be cheap.

Question: what happens when we send a carrier strike group within a hundred kilometers of their sandcastles?

While I agree that this is all a Chinese ploy to increase their influence and power projection for some long term game without ever having to do some actual fighting because the Chinese have a big raging man boner for Sun Tzu, it's a very easy ploy to counter, and to do so, all you have to do is force them into a confrontation that will take the momentum out of their aggression and of their naval buildup.

Though such a strategy is the best to stop China from achieving Global Hegemony or even Parity with the United States, the problem is that, though we'd never once have to get into a ground war with the PLA, the PLA has numerous ground based missile silos and missile trucks and the PLA navy has numerous missile boats and a quite a lot of missile chucking submarines, all of which are more than capable of reaching and fucking up our carriers.

To confound matters, aside from the obvious advantage the Chinese would have with their ground based missile silos and missile trucks, the PLA Navy would have the benefit of operating extremely close to home and access to all of the many ports along the entire Chinese coastline which could easily be converted for repair and supply points.

American naval units, by contrast, would have to set up their own repair and supply points or else rely on foreign governments that might be more flaky than an art major when it comes to giving the Navy what it needs to defend them so far away from American shores.

This isn't even getting into potential sabotage or asymmetrical attacks the US Navy could face, and certainly not into the aircraft.

Fortunately for us, China wants to own the US, not kill the US. They are well aware that innovation comes from the US and then they steal the knowledge and iterate the refinements and cut the business out from under us.

Their desired endgame is a US that's a little innovation-producing, fully-owned province. Nuclear war doesn't quite fit into that.

Can they bloody our noses with high-tech long range missiles? Absolutely. That's just pressing a button. Can they trigger thermonuclear war? Absolutely. That's just pressing a button. Can they win a mixed-arms fight against us? No, but whatever happens, it almost certain not to be a mixed-arms fight.

Although now you mention it, Obama only has limited time to double down on the greatest classic blunder; getting involved in a land war in Asia.

You know, whenever someone mentions that tautology of getting into a land war in Asia, my reflexive reaction, aside from punching them in their fat fucking, thought throttling faces, is to ask them how the fuck Europe was able to keep such a tight hold on Asia for so long despite undoubtedly having to fight, successfully I might add, more than one land war in Asia.

Aside from that though, your comment is confused. For one thing, you're confusing a naval war for a land war, and no where in my post did I say a war breaking out between China and the US would be a land war, which it wouldn't be, primarily because then the Chinese would be forced to consider nuclear weapons as an option once we fuck up their infantry and mechanized cavalry too much if we ever decided for a mainland invasion of China. On that, now that I mention it, a war between China and the US would also be an air war as well, to the point where it's likely first going to be an air war before it becomes a proper naval campaign.

On that note, since the Chinese are obviously not ready for a true confrontation with the US yet in terms of overall power projection, though they have formidable power projection in their own neighborhood, Obama calling China's bluff and either making China get into a naval or air war or else make its leaders lose face by increasing the naval and air force presence in the region would actually be one of the smarter moves of his Presidency, since letting a land of fuck faced weasels like the Chinese become another Soviet Union or eclipse the US is the definition of a bad fucking idea and would save the US and the world a lot of grief that would have otherwise occurred.

I'm very skeptical of analyses that count missiles and numbers as determinative. Yes, they have them, but the society behind them is wholly corrupt. Those missiles will fly after a week given a supply chain behind them that exists. What I'm hearing is that the numbers meet the glorious, ever-victorious PLA and its stead-fast CCP leadership's quotas and look great in war games, but that there is no gasoline available because it's all be sold on the black market and the profits are sitting safely in Hong Kong.

The U.S. has a lot of problem, and I expect we'd get our yankee asses kicked for a good year to two years. (I'm feeling that way even more so tonight after watching a short U.S. Navy documentary on Great Lakes Naval Recruit Training Command and comparing it now to my time there...wholly cow. I'm still wrapping my head around the fact they put 30-year old men in charge of 18-year old women recruits and there there is such a thing as a cute Company Commander).

But that is pretty standard for the U.S. We always are not ready, our peacetime Army and Navy is always terrible, full of politicians and stocked with crap supply. North Africa, 1940 for example.

It looks worse than it is right now because we are not under any serious threat. If things got real, the fat would be burned off and we would re-discover that guys like Patton or Nimitz are in fact more important than diversity.

I've lived through a lot of hype about rising Asian power. The bottom line is that, except for Japan, the Asian societies are low-trust structures. A high-trust society on a war fighting mode will overwhelm their limited capacity for large-scale enterprise within pretty short order, as low-trust structures are dependent on high-trust middle-men to make their system run. This is why HK's legal system is so important to Beijing, tech acquisition from the U.S. is equally important, heavy machinery comes from Vienna, etc.

Take those high-trust society's off-the-shelf good away from the Chinese and they're back to waves of peasants within five years.

"You know, whenever someone mentions that tautology of getting into a land war in Asia, my reflexive reaction, aside from punching them in their fat fucking, thought throttling faces, is to ask them how the fuck Europe was able to keep such a tight hold on Asia for so long despite undoubtedly having to fight, successfully I might add, more than one land war in Asia."

You do know how European colonization of Asia came about right? A lot of conflicts had some element of sea power involved, and conquests were incremental. What was the shortest, most successful European military intervention in Asia? The Opium Wars? Maybe, but victory came with the powerful British navy.

You can get involved in a purely land war in Asia and win sure, but it will most likely take tens to hundreds of years to pacify, if ever, the populations, thus the dictum: Don't.

"For one thing, you're confusing a naval war for a land war, and no where in my post did I say a war breaking out between China and the US would be a land war, which it wouldn't be, primarily because then the Chinese would be forced to consider nuclear weapons as an option once we fuck up their infantry and mechanized cavalry too much if we ever decided for a mainland invasion of China. On that, now that I mention it, a war between China and the US would also be an air war as well, to the point where it's likely first going to be an air war before it becomes a proper naval campaign. "

A land war could take place in places like Okinawa, or the Philippines, or Taiwan even, unless you would consider that part of amphibious operations. But considering nuclear weapons? I don't think so, even if the US could overwhelm the obviously numerically superior Chinese on land.

Air war? Yes, but Kadena Air Base will be the first to be bombed. Planes will have to come from the Philippines (assuming basing isn't an issue) Guam or carriers. Still if the US couldn't bomb Iraq into submission they aren't going to have much luck with China.

There would be some combination of air, sea, and land power depending on objectives and depending on what the conflict is about, and where it erupts (South China Sea, East China Sea, Taiwan Straits), and the reliability of US allies in the region. But nuclear weapons won't be used, China has too few to threaten the US mainland.

This thread is proof that conservatives absolutely refuse to leave the year 1945, aircraft carriers, please cracker. If there is any hostilities of a serious nature Captain Lee of the PRA will be activated, he will go to his nice American office upload a virus and shut down his company's website, and this will be repeated thruout 'Murka till the FSA takes it from there.

If you think getting hacked was bad, you should see their clusterfuck of a response. OPM is so inept that DoD CIO and service and agencies are having to get involved in getting information out. OPM emails are getting marked as spam, and are apparently so easy to spoof, government employees who get one are having to send it through their service or agency CIO to make sure it's real.

The USAF OMG the Lindy West of services, so there they are sitting in their luxurious digs at Kadena (compared to Camp Foster) and a few missles land on the strip, flight ops cancelled, everyone sent home because its scary. Captain Lee's peers who have spent years if not decades getting into the employment of the contractors that run the AF then upload their viruses and then the AF's computer system slows down to a crawl and the AF brass comes off the greens and manually types out a response that blames the Navy.

"OK as a popular gal I can not stop there, so here is a bit of get you out of the abyss on a like subject so you get your mind unwarped on the story. Those government employee files which the Chicoms are being blamed for hacking........nopers not the story. The Peking girls are being blamed, but someone is looking at all those names looking for...........people who do not exist.You figure the rest of it out my children and my brats..........I am still awaiting that big 350,000 dollar donation."

The problem with the Chinese is that so many of the poor are expendable. They wouldn't care if we nuked a couple hundred million people as long as the right people are in bunkers.

Our masters think the same way.

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Vox: please fix the comment box sign in defect: if one is commenting for the first time and hs not signed into Google previously, hitting the Publish or Preview button sends one to Google's log in page; but when one is sent back to your page, the comment has been removed. If one did not first copy his comment before hitting the buttons, the comment must be rewritten.Thanks.

"Whoever now holds OPM’s records possesses something like the Holy Grail from a CI perspective. ...(to get an idea of how detailed this gets, you can see the form, called an SF86, here).""

It took me days to fill mine out. That's days of basic training time. One bright side of the ordeal, it got me out of a lot scut work and I got to talk to my parents on the phone every day I was working on the form.

Some of the guys I went to language school with were still filling theirs out in language school. One guy kept remembering individual times he smoked pot. At first it was 25 times, eventually it was 125 and he was sure there were more but he just couldn't remember them. They wanted date, time of day, location and who he was with when he was smoking it. Not only did he get a clearance but he became a qualified operator on a flying platform.

Another guy was an army brat and had lived in several foreign countries before he turned 18. It isn't the volume of information or the physical act of filling out the form but the gathering of the info that takes the time. Finding people you haven't talked to in years, getting those people on the phone and waiting on them to find some paperwork, that's what takes the time.

I agree with you militarily, Emmanuel Mateo-Morales.The beginning of a real military conflict with China would be them pressing buttons on all their cool stuff that they stole from us and improved and it would not be a good day for us.

What happens after that will be a hot mess and I'm sure I could find a disagreement with you there.

"...says the mealy mouthed dip shit who thinks aircraft carriers are all it takes to win modern naval engagements, especially when the enemy has long range missiles that can hit you in Taiwanese, Filipino, and Japanese waters from well inside their border and missile boats designed for saturation fire and to be cheap."

Nobody knows exactly what it takes to win modern naval engagements because there haven't been any of note since the end of World War II. None of the advanced nations have had to fight for their lives against each other in a long time, so exactly what either side will do in another world war is anyone's guess. Attack the carriers? Yeah, nobody has thought about that possibility before or considered any possible ways to prevent it either.

"Question: what happens when we send a carrier strike group within a hundred kilometers of their sandcastles? "

They don't need to, retard, we've got satellites and drones that can see the islands perfectly.

Holy affirmative action. The Massive data breach was discovered by people that came in to do a product demonstration. This is more of a criticism of affirmative action than the Obamacare website that had 3 asian/white guys in CA create everything it lacked over a weekend for free. #Asian/whiteprivilege http://theconservativetreehouse.com/2015/06/11/wow-the-federal-cyber-breach-was-not-discovered-by-u-s-govt-was-discovered-by-private-company-during-product-demo/

The Chiese have now demonstrated the ultimate limits of their "Unrestricted Warfare" Doctrine, they can go to war with individual US citizens.

With the information they downloaded, they can blackmail these people, or apply legal, financial and other pressure on the ones who won't bend to their demands. And of course this administration failed to see this coming, or has any means to defend US citizens against individual attacks by foreign governments.

Perhaps the one "good thing" which will come from this is the realization that centralized and bureaucratic systems are all vulnerable to these sorts of attacks and failures; breaking up bureaucracies and severely limiting their powers is the only means of protecting against these attacks. Something the new Administration might start thinking about in jan 2017...

Sorry for the double post, but it took a bit of time to think through some of the other posts to respond.

WRT a potential naval conflict with the PLAN, while they certainly have lots of missiles and potentially some pretty devastating cyber weapons, the people who "smack talked" the USN forget that the US isn't the only player in the region. The PLAN will have to also deal with the Japanese, Koreans (potentially both the ROK and the DPRK, depending on the trigger and just how crazy the Kim Family Regime really is), and all the rest of the nations forming the "First Island Chain" blocking Chinese expansion into the Pacific and Indian oceans. Indonesia or any of the other players mining the Strait of Malacca alone will severely damage China for decades to come (India is not directly involved in the South China Sea confrontations, but has the motive to step into a naval war, and Australia also has the technical means to do this as well; pissing off everyone in your neighbourhood is not usually considered the optimum strategy).

So like most military confrontations, there will be lots of variables in play. Friction and the Fog of War will have negative effects on all the players, and in the end, like most wars, the winning combination will be logistics and the will to continue fighting. We have better logistics, it will have to be seen who actually has the better "will". As one person posted upthread, "high trust" societies do tend to do better in complex environments, and war is about as complex as you can get.